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Making Sense of the Paranormal:

A Platonic Context for Research Methods

Angela Voss

Judging by the number of academic conferences, research centres and publications now focussed on ‘paranormal’ experiences, it is clear that there is both an upsurge in scholarly interest in this challenging field and a wide variety of methodologies harnessed to address it.1 From psychical research and parapsychology, anthropology and social sciences, to literature, film and the arts, transpersonal and depth psychology and experiential frameworks based on participator observation, a vast range of extraordinary and anomalous phenomena is open to investigation by all, whether sceptic or sympathiser. However, whilst this can lead to a refreshing display of interdisciplinarity, there is also a danger that a lack of discrimination concerning the merits or appropriateness of methods used to address this non-rational realm may result in a ‘free for all’ hotch potch of contending positions and convictions, with no clear rationale with which to assess the deeper philosophical or epistemological issues involved. I am suggesting an approach to these issues which may inform and elucidate usages and engagements with the paranormal through providing a framework which both recognises multiple ways of knowing, and also situates them within a coherent whole. This model is essentially derived from Platonic and neoplatonic . has been denounced by the positivistic strand of twentieth century philosophy and science, partly because of its association with fascism and communism (Hedley 2008: 269-282) but mainly because it champions the potential of noetic cognition, a mode of which tends to be denied, if not destroyed, by the stronghold of the rational mind (Atkins 2011, McGilchrist 2009: 347, Stove 1991: ch.7). However writers such as Nelson (2001), Kripal (2010) and Shaw (2011) call for scholars to intelligently explore hidden dimensions of experience through building bridges between the public discourses of scepticism and the private ones of authentic anomalous experience (Shaw 2011: 18). I posit that the adoption of models derived from pre-modern religious philosophy may do this through preserving the mystery of numinous encounters whilst also providing route maps for their exploration. presents a radical vision of the initiatory potential of philosophical enquiry, one which goes against the grain of the Aristotelian focus on the primacy of objective, empirical observation. Within his dialogues Plato combines both dialectic and mythological narrative in order to articulate the complementary roles of rational analysis and revelatory illumination within a scheme of human which is teleological, i.e. progressive in terms of the education and consciousness of the human being. It is my suggestion that the most effective methods for examining non-rational phenomena might extend beyond both and to incorporate the supra-rational cognitive faculties recognised by Platonic , i.e. the active imagination and the intuitive intellect.

1 How one defines ‘paranormal’ depends on one’s definition of ‘normal’. For the purposes of this essay I am using the OED definition: ‘supposed psychical events and phenomena ... whose operation is outside the scope of the known of nature or of normal scientific understanding.’

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Rational methodology alone tends towards quantification and analysis within the limits of its own epistemological field of vision which is a fundamentally counter-intuitive one. It asks ‘how’ and not ‘why’ in relation to seemingly inexplicable events, for which it seeks demonstrable causes or cognitive mechanisms. I intend to unlock the limitations of this essentially left hemispheric perceptual framework, exhaustively researched by McGilchrist (2009: ch.6) by raising the question of the mode of perception required to experience paranormal events as meaningful, and what their ontological status or ‘verity’ might be within a wider frame of reference.

Central to this issue is the concept of analogous knowing or adaequatio famously formulated by (Summa Theologiae I, qu.21), as ‘the is the adequation between the intellect and thing’ (veritus est adaequatio intellectus) - that different modes of cognition are appropriate for different dimensions of reality, and that what the individual sees and understands as ‘true’ will depend on the congruence between the level of consciousness and the thing perceived. This would raise the question of the researcher’s own affective engagement with the subject, and would require a willingness to release the hegemony of the rational mind. I am certainly not suggesting however that a participative approach to paranormal reality should exclude clear and critical thinking - indeed the 21st century researcher can no longer assume the ultimate truth of a divinely ordered cosmos, nor can he or she simply make naive claims for paranormal experiences as ‘real’. Before we delve into the Platonic mysteries, I will give a brief thought to the problematic of paranormal studies within the academy. In our society, forms of divination and ‘psychic’ practices such as mediumship tend to bear the brunt of condemnation as irrational or superstitious (i.e. with no intellectual foundation). For the past four hundred years or so the paradigm established by Enlightenment philosophy has been dominant in our universities, according to which matters of the spirit (qua spirit) are placed firmly outside the remit of acceptable scholarly investigation. Geoffrey Cornelius, in his study of divinatory hermeneutics, has shown how was seminal in destroying the possibility of spiritual knowledge as ‘truth’ (Cornelius 2009: ch.1). Cornelius regards Kant’s early work Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) as a critical move to establish the impossibility of attaining objective knowledge of the spirit world. Here Kant ‘brings into sharp relief the intellectual revolution bound up with the rise of scientific method ... through an extensive [he] deconstructs and disavows both spirit-philosophy and an initiatory occult philosophy founded upon it.’ (Cornelius 2009: 26) Kant confronts head-on the problem of delusion in sensory experience and articulates the crisis in the nature of thought when it finds itself confronted with non-rational experience. In deconstructing Emanuel Swedenborg’s spirit philosophy, Kant relegates the entire realm of symbolic or spiritual knowledge to ‘negative epistemology’, that is, ultimately unknowable (Cornelius 2009: 41). Even more worrying for Kant is the tendency to assume knowledge of spiritual matters by concocting fantasies and false or deluded interpretations, which he calls ‘surreptitious concepts’ (Walford and Meerbote 1992: fn. 2, 320 cited in Cornelius 2009: 32-33) so that all intellectual discrimination is lost. The philosopher, says Kant, should stay in the clear skies of positive knowledge, ‘cut his cloth to his own powers’ and not venture into realms which will forever remain clouded . Now in fact we may agree that Kant is right in stating that the truth status of the spiritual realm lies outside the order of positive knowledge, and that most attempts to speak of it in rational terms are bound to demonstrate its lack of any solid epistemological premises within those terms. This has become the pervasive modern paradigm of

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scientific knowledge which now claims supremacy. But in denying that a spiritual or transcendent realm can or should be known at all, in different ways or by different perceptive faculties, this assumption negates the pre-Enlightenment model in which the radically ‘other’ dimension of spiritual or divine reality is indeed knowable. Such knowledge requires a ‘turn’ away from sense perception and quantitative analysis to another mode of seeing which is essentially symbolic or metaphoric. This mode is understood in Platonism to be primary, arising from a deep ontological identity between the human and its ground of being. In severing rational thinking from these ‘praeter-rational’ roots and thus relegating them to the domain of the ‘irrational’ or ‘superstitious’, what were once seen as the higher faculties of the soul have become subverted in what Joseph Milne has termed the ‘ontological inversion’ of Enlightenment thought (Milne 2002: 5). The telephone wires have been cut, as it were, between gods and humans as knowledge becomes redefined in purely empirical terms. In this light, it is easy to see why attempts to ‘prove’ paranormal phenomena using the methods of ‘positive thought’ such as data collection will go nowhere, because at a fundamental level, we are talking of phenomena that subsist outside the very manner of thinking which requires proof. And this is where the post Enlightenment thinker simply does not go.2 However, Kant is clearly fascinated by Swedenborg’s exact clairvoyant knowledge of a fire which broke out in Stockholm, whilst he was at a dinner party forty miles away (Walford and Meerbote 1992: 2.355-6, Cornelius 2009: 42-6). This episode raises the crucial issue of the ‘unique case’ of paranormal experience and the impossibility of assimilating it into a rational paradigm. Cornelius maintains that ‘the sceptical move that cancels the unique case remains constitutive of mainstream academic and philosophical opinion, especially when it comes to paranormal phenomena’ (Cornelius 2009: 47), and indeed we find that since the kinds of unique cases we are dealing with (for example, the clairvoyant or clairaudient message, the UFO or ghost sighting etc.) do not have knowledge-status and cannot be verified through abstract reasoning, they therefore often become ‘mere’ personal anecdote or colourful poetic narrative which do not impinge on ‘the truth of the matter’. It is undoubtedly a fact that spiritual phenomena resist positive knowledge (Cornelius 2009: 48) but to therefore reject them, or cancel them out, simply perpetuates the rather arrogant assumption that positive knowledge is the benchmark of true knowledge. Even more worryingly, it denies the function of the symbolic in revealing an order of being which has an ontological verity beyond the remit of reason - a verity which in the Sufi branch of is called ‘realisation’ in that it carries with it the self- evidence of certainty and as such cannot be undermined by those who have not tasted it (Chittick 2007: 2-3, 23-5). We are talking here of an acknowledgement of presence, not a re-presentation of the phenomenon through theoretical analysis. The symbolic image or text has always been the mode of divine revelation in religious and esoteric discourse. The assumption that practitioners of divination or mediumship ‘believe’ in some kind of false model of reality, a distortion of ‘how things really are’ is a result of a type of thinking about the nature of the symbolic which reduces it to the non-real or fiction, and unfortunately this is not helped by the attempts of practitioners themselves to justify their intuitive insights and interpretations in terms of objective ‘fact’ (as indeed Kant lamented). So let us now turn to the foundational Platonic model of ‘knowledge through sympathy’ which opens

2 As an example of the impossibility of allowing the paranormal vision ontological verity in clinical psychology, take this statement: ‘Many people who report paranormal sightings .. are apparently sincere. This places many such sightings in the category of eyewitness errors, rather than of deliberate deception.’( Sharps, Newborg, Van Arsdall et al. 2010: abstract)

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up the territory of the levels of meaning contained within a symbolic image, levels which can only be accessed through specific modes of perception. The neoplatonist Proclus (412-487 CE) neatly encapsulates the principle behind this way of thinking:

Every cognition through similitude binds the knower to that which is known: to the sensible or object of sense-perception the perceptive cognition, to cognizable objects discursive reason, to intelligible objects intelligible cognition, and therefore also to that which is prior to intellect the flower of the intellect is correspondent. (Proclus, Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles cited in Johnson 1988: 125) In other words, ‘knowledge varies according to the nature of the knowing agent’ (Proclus, In 956.35-957.32 cited in Siorvanes 1996: 53) and unfolds in four stages or modes: through sense perception, reason, intelligibility and intellect, each with its own domain of reference. We are familiar with sense perception and reason, indeed these modes have become our privileged pathways to knowledge; but nobody today talks of the intelligible and the intellectual dimensions of knowledge in any practical sense, as physical science has assumed the mantle of ultimate truth about the reality of the world we live in. The Platonic vision however inextricably connects the human psyche as microcosm to the macrocosm of the cosmos, in a symbolic or archetypal image of tremendous scope. The contemporary American philosopher Jacob Needleman has beautifully expressed this sense of a living universe with its own coherent pattern of unfolding:

The spheres which encompass the earth in the cosmological schemes of antiquity and the Middle Ages represent levels of conscious energy and purpose which ‘surround’ the earth much as the physiological function of an organ such as the heart ‘surrounds’ or permeates each of the separate tissues which comprise it ... in this understanding, the earth is inextricably enmeshed in a network of purposes, a ladder or hierarchy of intentions. A cosmos is an organism in the sense of a hierarchy of purposeful energies. (Needleman 1975: 17) For ‘intelligibility’ then, one may substitute ‘consciousness’ which embraces both human and cosmic , and is glimpsed through the power of metaphor. As Jeffrey Kripal has pointed out, ‘Psychical and paranormal phenomena are hermeneutical realities. They work like texts and stories’ (Kripal 2010: 257), and the of a story is its meaning for the reader. Plato too calls his cosmogonic myth in the ‘a likely story’ (29d), recognising the power of the poetic to evoke a ‘prophetic intuition’ or sixth sense about the hidden nature of reality behind its outwardly observable appearance (as described in 974b). In the Timaeus Plato posits two distinct realms of existence, the divine and the human, as a basis for both his cosmology and epistemology. In his narrative (29c-43d), the human soul is created from the same substance as the world soul, which is primary, indestructible and unchanging and is itself generated by the supreme intelligence, the active principle of the One or source of all being. However, upon descent into the material world and embodied existence, the soul loses its original purity and becomes distorted, confused and a prey to the impressions and influences of the time-bound realm of generation. It is the purpose of Platonic paideia or education to re-align the soul to its original condition through awakening in it the memory of its original immortal condition, and then it is able consciously to return. The most well-known narrative to describe this process is the in the (514a-520a) where Plato likens the majority of the human race to cave dwellers, shackled and only able to see flickering images projected onto the back wall of the cave. Thus they define their reality in terms of these shadows, never seeing the ‘real’ objects being carried by people walking along a wall behind them, or the fire which casts the shadows. It is only the rare who are able to free themselves who can

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turn round and go out into the light, seeing the objects for what they are, the fire beyond and eventually the sun itself as a symbol of ultimate reality. Such a soul should then return to the cave to reveal this truth to the others, but is usually not believed. To return to our levels of knowledge, one can apply Plato’s famous ‘divided line’ metaphor (Republic 509d-513e) to the cave allegory. Human and divine knowledge, as the darkness of the cave and the light of the sun, are characterised as ‘sensible’ and ‘intelligible’ forms of knowing. The sensible world is the visible world, and corresponding to it are the modes of perception we call opinion (eikasia) and (pistis) which are devoid of rational analysis or understanding. These are the only faculties available to the cave-dwellers, who are not able to subject their to any deeper stratum of universal truth or law. For Plato, the senses alone without understanding are not to be trusted and may concoct fantasies and imaginings which are merely products of ignorant confusion, not true images of the divine realm. Thus the idea of the ‘lower’ imagination developed, as the image-making faculty which never leaves the world of illusion. Plato implies that most people, most of the time, are content with the face-value of things and do not seek any further knowledge about them. However, once the cave has been left behind, the way is open to the rational faculty to develop the art of dianoia or reasoning, to dispel the illusions of the cave and discover the universal laws and principles which govern existence. Plotinus describes dianoia as ‘the science which can speak about everything in a reasoned and orderly way ... with certain knowledge about everything and not mere opinion’ (Enneads 1.3, trans. Armstrong 1989: 157-9). But such disciplined thought is not the final goal. Beyond the rational faculties of the soul lie noetic modes of knowledge related to realms of being beyond the physical world, senses and the reason. Tim Addey has shown how Plato deliberately uses three modes of discourse in his dialogues: statement of accepted truth, rational examination of the thesis, and the telling of myth; the latter being specifically employed to evoke a deep intuitive sense of knowledge through inner resonance (Addey 2002). This final stage is described by Plato in his Seventh Letter (344b) as a flash of insight or inspiration which follows painstaking rational enquiry.3 Each revelatory moment of this kind must constitute a ‘unique case’, an unreplicable, non-verifiable insight of a radically different order from ; it is the divine inspiration of the poet, a direct, unmediated intuition of supranormal apprehension which can often only be conveyed through a symbolic image or sacred text. It is for Plato intellectual knowing, and precedes the final gnostic union which is the goal of philosophy (see 250b-c). The later Platonists, beginning with Plotinus (Enneads IV.4,13), associated this noetic apprehension with a ‘higher’ imaginative faculty in the soul, thus establishing the idea of the creative imagination giving access to divine truth which was to be so celebrated by Romantic poets such as Blake and Coleridge (Mackey 1986: ch.2). Ghosts, spirits, UFOs or aliens do not arise from or inhabit the world of the senses (although they may adopt visible or audible forms). Visionary and esoteric traditions place the echelons of discarnate beings - from the souls of the dead, heroes, elemental and cosmic daimones, to the gods themselves - in ontological locations beyond those accessible to empirical observation, and to see these orders of being for what they are would require the activation of ‘extra-sensory’

3 ‘Hardly after practicing detailed comparisons of names and and visual and other sense , after scrutinizing them in benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy, at last in a flash understanding of each blazes up, and the mind as it exerts all its powers to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light’ (trans. Uzdavinys 2005: 71). This flash of insight is called hierognosis by Henry Corbin, ‘the spontaneous perception of the suprasensory in the sensory’ (Corbin 1975b: 56)

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faculties of perception which may indeed give rise to sudden illuminations in the manner described by Plato. Here one is moving beyond belief or inference to recognition of presence. The neoplatonist Iamblichus (245-325 CE) emphasises this difference between syllogistic and noetic knowing:

Indeed, to tell the truth, the contact we have with the divinity is not to be taken as knowledge. Knowledge, after all, is separated from its object by some degree of otherness. But prior to that knowledge, which knows another as being itself other, there is the unitary connection with the gods that is natural and indivisible. We should not accept, then, that this is something that we can either grant or not grant, nor admit to it as ambiguous…nor should we examine the question as though we were in a position either to assent to it or to reject it; for it is rather the case that we are enveloped by the divine presence, and we are filled with it, and we possess our very essence by virtue of our knowledge that there are gods. (Iamblichus De mysteriis 1.3 trans. Clarke et al. 2003: 13) Rational methods devoid of this ‘sixth sense’ may speculate about possible meanings and purposes of non-rational phenomena, but they cannot intuit these meanings in the unique contexts in which they arise. As Robert J. Dobie has pointed out, ‘discursive reasoning cannot attain to reality as such but only to regions of reality that can be classified into genera and species’ (Dobie 2010: 26). To move to ‘reality as such’, to the dimension in which spiritual phenomena are perceived as ‘real’, requires the opening of consciousness to their images through the activation of a noetic intuition which according to Plotinus, ‘all have but few use’ (Enneads I.6,8 trans. Armstrong 1989: 259).4 That this particular use of imagination might play a crucial role in experiences of ‘other worlds’ is suggested by Carol Zaleski (1987: 2005), who refers to the ‘religious imagination’ as ‘mediating the search for ultimate truth’ in the field of near-death and out of body experiences. She remarks that ‘our defence of near-death reports depends on treating them as symbolic expressions that can never be translated into direct observations or exact concepts’ (Zaleski 1987: 199). This question of the potency of the symbolic brings us now to the central question of revelation. Given that the Platonic ‘intelligible’ mode pertains to revealed knowledge of other dimensions, we should explore further what this means. Revelation is the religious term for the shining through into human consciousness of a reality from a different ontological level, often in the form of a symbolic ‘opening’ of meaning: ‘revelation reveals creation in an analogical mode’ says Dobie (2010: 21). Although revelation requires reason to interpret its message, it is in essence the actualisation of a level of reality which is neither fully objective nor subjective (Dobie 2010: 46). This is a place of encounter which Henry Corbin has called the mundus imaginalis or intermediary world, where spirit takes on form, and matter becomes spiritualised, and which is accessed via the creative imagination (Corbin 1975a, 1999). One of the clearest and most relevant explanations of the problematic involved in discriminating between this world of the ‘concrete’ imagination and our world of sense perceptible reality is given by the founder of Sufism, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), who brings a neoplatonic epistemology to bear on Islamic mysticism in a potent fusion of rational enquiry and spiritual vision. His theorising on his own encounters with spirits or jinn provides helpful insights for current paranormal research, because he clarifies the distinction

4 Although this statement may be interpreted as elitist (and it is undoubtedly a fact that ‘esoteric philosophy’ has been appropriated in social contexts as a means of reinforcing power politics (see e.g. Goodrick-Clarke 1992), I would like to emphasise that here Plotinus is simply articulating the view that visionary consciousness is not ‘normal’ consciousness, and it therefore needs cultivation through contemplative practices which are available to all but used by few.

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between sense-perceptible and imaginal reality, a distinction often muddied in the claims of participants that paranormal visions are simply ‘real’ (Chittick 1994: ch.6). Ibn ‘Arabi describes spiritual intelligences as mobile, changeable entities which may appear as autonomous, embodied beings in both outer ‘objective’ reality and ‘internal’ visions. This is why he places such emphasis on the idea that the soul has two eyes: the eye of revelation which sees into the divine world, and the eye of the senses which sees the forms in which the imaginal beings clothe themselves:

Revelation is a meaning. When God wants meaning to descend to sense-perception, it has to pass through the Presence of Imagination before it reaches sense-perception. The reality of imagination demands that it gives sensory form to everything that becomes actualised within it .. If the [revelation] arrives at the time of wakefulness, it is called ‘imaginalisation’ ... that is why revelation begins with imagination.

(Ibn ‘Arabi, al- Futūhāt al-Makkiya II.375.32 cited in Chittick 1994: 75) The imagination then, acts as a mediating ground: ‘the degree of imagination embraces that of sense perception and meaning. Hence it subtilises the sensory object and densifies meaning’ (Chittick 1989: 115). Perhaps the nearest most people can come to appreciating this is through the heightened reality that is produced by certain altered states of consciousness or dreams, where people and objects appear as fully embodied and tangible, indeed often as more ‘real’ than in normal life. Ibn ‘Arabi suggests that such visions are facilitated by the imagination as an ‘active’ agent, as Chittick explains:

[Imagination] brings spiritual entities into relationship with corporeal entities ... By giving incorporeal realities the attributes of corporeal things ... imagination allows unseen realities to be described as possessing attributes that pertain to the visible world ... Unseen things actually take on visible form in the imaginal realms. (Chittick 1994: 73). Ibn ‘Arabi uses the metaphor of a mirror-image to describe the relationship between our world and the unseen world reflected in the imagination, for things seen in a mirror are paradoxically both fully real yet fully unreal at the same time (Morris 1995: 42-49). Thus, however ‘embodied’ spirits appear to be, Ibn ‘Arabi posits that they are in essence imaginal and therefore immune to the laws which govern our material world. They may transmute into other forms, disappear in a flash or remain invisible to those whose revelatory eye is not attuned to their presence.5 It also appears that in certain individuals the imaginal eye may operate during normal wakefulness, and in this case the veil between the two worlds falls away: ‘the person who undergoes unveiling sees while he is awake what the dreamer sees while he is asleep’ (Chittick 1994: 84). Such souls will be able to identify materialised spirits through recognising a ‘mark’ of identification, on which Ibn ‘Arabi does not elaborate further. Presumably such a mark would be obvious to those able to discern it, but as Chittick points out, ‘the Shaykh could live joyfully in

5 See also this statement by Proclus: ‘The gods themselves are incorporeal, but since those who see them possess bodies, the visions which issue from the gods to worthy recipients possess a certain quality from the gods who send them but also have something connatural with those who see them. This is why the gods are seen yet not seen at all. In fact, those who see the gods witness them in the luminous garments of their souls. The point is, they are often seen when the eyes are shut. (Proclus, In rempublicam I.39, 5-17 cited in Shaw 2011:24 )

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the knowledge that he recognised the mark of every apparition. The rest of us, lacking in marks, had best be careful’ (Chittick 1994: 95). It stands to reason then, that any attempt to apply the methods of empirical scientific research to ascertain the ‘reality’ of such apparitions will be doomed to failure, despite their apparent concreteness and tangibility to the observer, because they belong to a different modality. One can stretch the rational paradigm through creating discourses of vibrational levels, energy fields and parallel universes with which to ‘explain’ paranormal encounters, but such paradigms remain in the domain of abstract theorising. The point of imaginal visions is their direct connection with the state of consciousness of those who see them, and this involves affectivity, desire, emotion and spiritual receptivity. Without a metaphysical framework in which such qualities are understood as cognitive, it is difficult to see how a study of imaginal encounters can be taken any further. In terms of ‘location’ of spirit beings, esoteric philosophy would understand spatial-temporal distinctions to be products of the rational mind, not the spirit world. Thus it is possible to ‘see’ as real the embodied astral form of someone who may be hundreds of miles away, or who has died. The apparition may be projected as it were into material reality, and therefore be fully sense perceptible, or it may be accessed imaginally, by the ‘inner’ eye (Chittick 1994: 89). This suggests that it is not the spiritual beings themselves who change their locations, but rather that their location depends on which eye is looking – and then it seems that they can either be understood as externally existing, or internally present. In either case they cannot be said to ‘exist’ in the same way as human beings or material objects. Categories such as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ have no meaning in non-spatial dimensions; in practice, the presence of the daimon or spiritual intelligence (particularly in channelling and mediumship) confounds attempts to define it as either a psychological condition or an autonomous being. As the 15th century Platonist Marsilio Ficino concludes, ‘remember our daemon and genius is not only, as is thought, our intellect, but [also] a numinous being (numen)’ (Ficino 1576: 515 cited in Allen 1995: 64).6 What I am attempting to articulate here is the inextricable connection between the ‘psychic’ ability of the individual and what they see or experience. Chittick gives several instances of Ibn ‘Arabi’s own encounters with spirits, which demonstrate the fluidity and variability of visionary ability. He tells us that sometimes he alone could see the apparition, sometimes it appeared as ambiguous to others, and sometimes it would be definitely seen by others present (Chittick 1994: 89-95). For example, in 1202 Ibn ‘Arabi encountered the spirit of a holy man, Ahman al-Sabit, who had died four hundred years previously. He saw a beautiful man, who seemed to pass through the bodies of other walkers, as he was circumambulating the Kabbah:

My mind was turned toward him and my eyes were upon him, lest he slip away ... when he had completed his seven turns and wanted to leave, I seized hold of him and greeted him. He returned the greeting and smiled at me. All this time I did not take my gaze off him fearing that he would slip away from me. For I had no doubt that he was an embodied spirit, and I knew that eyesight kept him fixed. (Ibn ‘Arabi, al-Futūhāt al-Makkiya IV.12.1, cited in Chittick 1994: 94)

6 This ambiguity is especially evident in the phenomenon of channelling, where the distinction between a ‘supraconscious’ element of the psyche and a separate personality is often unclear even to the channellers themselves (Klimo 1998: 30-33).

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Ibn Arabi’s experience of ‘fixing’ the spirit through the quality and direction of the gaze implies that it is the contact with human eyesight which allows the spirit being to take on a visible form, but once the gaze is released and the spirit moves, it may disappear in an instant. Since the advent of spirit photography and other technological ways of recording concrete ‘evidence’ such as video and EVP recordings, the question of imaginal perception has become even more confused with apparent objectivity. We now have a universally observable collection of phenomena which apparently need no exercise of the imagination in order to be perceived for what they are.7 However, I would suggest that such empirical proof of spirit activity remains highly problematic precisely because it makes visible or audible to everyone phenomena which ultimately defy rational explanation. Objective proof depends on the kind of thinking which corresponds to it, i.e. literal and empirical, thus visibility alone will never ‘prove’ a non-visible, non-physical origin which may only be discerned through a noetic means of perception. I hope I have now made it clear why a Platonic perspective would benefit a trajectory of paranormal research which seeks to gain some hold on the ontological status of observed phenomena, through establishing a framework for modes of perception beyond the rational. Such a framework would provide a rationale for the co-existence of multiple perspectives and ways of knowing – but it would also require a willingness for secular researchers to be open to the imaginative and symbolic language of religious philosophy, to expand their field of enquiry to question their own epistemological assumptions, and to acknowledge that the quest for knowledge of extra-ordinary phenomena may require extra-ordinary modes of cognition.

------Recommended Reading Chittick, W. 2007. Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: the Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World. Oxford: One World Publications Hedley, D. and Hutton, S. (eds) 2008. Platonism at the Origins of Modernity Dordrecht: Springer Kripal, J. J. 2010. Authors of the Impossible: the Paranormal and the Sacred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Bibliography Addey, T. 2002. ‘Myth, the final phase of Platonic Education’ (unpublished paper at http://www.prometheustrust.co.uk/html/myth_-_philosophy.html) Allen, M.J.B. 1995. ‘Summoning Plotinus: Ficino, Smoke and the Strangled Chickens’ in Plato’s Third Eye, XIV. Aldershot: Variorum. 63-88. Atkins, P. 2011. On Being – a scientist’s exploration of the great questions of being. Oxford: Oxford University Press Aquinas, T. Summa theologica online at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ Armstrong, A.H. (ed.) 1989. Plotinus, Enneads vol.1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Cardoso, A. 2010. Electronic Voices: Contact with another Dimension? Ropley, Hants: O-

7 Crop circles provide another example of imaginal reality ‘stamped’ on the material world. Discussion tends to revolve around the logistics of ‘how’ these patterns are made in terms of human action, and does not take up the question of ‘why’ such beautiful symbolic designs appear fleetingly in the countryside, or the effects of such symbols on the human psyche (see Rowlandson 2011).

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Books Chittick, W. 1989. The Sufi Path of Knowedge: Ibn ‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. New York: SUNY Press Chittick, W. 1994. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn Al’Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. New York: SUNY Press Chodorow, J. 1997. Jung on Active Imagination. London: Routledge Clarke, E., Dillon, J. and Herschbell, J. (eds) 2003. Iamblichus, on the Mysteries. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Studies Corbin, H. 1975a. ‘Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginal and the Imaginary’ in Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam ed. L. Fox. West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation, 1-34. Corbin, H. 1975b. ‘Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics’ in Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam ed. L. Fox. West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation. 35-51. Corbin, H. 1999. Alone with the Alone; Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Princeton: Princeton University Press Cornelius, G. 2003. The Moment of Astrology: Origins in Divination. Bournemouth: the Wessex Astrologer Cornelius, G. 2009. ‘Field of Omens: A Study in Inductive Divination’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Kent Dobie, R.J. 2010. Logos and Revelation: Ibn ‘Arabi, Meister Eckhart and Mystical Hermeneutics. Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press Emerson, R.W. 1850/2004 ‘Swedenborg, or the Mystic’ in Representative Men. New York: Random House Ficino, M. 1576/2000. Opera omnia, 2 vols. Basle, repr. Paris: Phénix Editions Goodrick-Clarke, N. 2002. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University Press Klimo, J. 1998. Channelling: Investigations on receiving information from paranormal sources Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books Mackey, J. 1986. Religious Imagination. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Milne, J. 2002. ‘Providence, Time and Destiny’. Unpublished lecture at http://www.astrodivination.com/provid.pdf Morris, J. 1995. ‘Spiritual Imagination and the Liminal World: Ibn ‘Arabi on the Barzakh’, Postdata vol. 15 (no. 2), 42-49 Needleman, J. 1975. A Sense of the Cosmos: the encounter of modern science with ancient truth. New York: Doubleday Nelson, V. 2001. The Secret Life of Puppets. Harvard: Harvard University Press Hamilton, E and Cairns, H. (eds) 1961. Plato, Complete Works. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press Johnson, T.M. (ed.) 1988. Iamblichus: The Exhortation to Philosophy. Grand Rapids: Phanes Press Progoff, I. 1973. Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny. New York: The Julian Press Rowlandson, W. 2011. ‘Crop Circles as Psychoid Manifestation: borrowing C.G. Jung’s analysis of UFOs to approach the phenomenon of the Crop Circle’, Paranthropology vol. 2, no.4, 42-59 Shaw, G. 1998. Theurgy and the Soul: the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press. Shaw, G. 2010. ‘The Role of Aesthesis in Theurgy’. Unpublished paper. Shaw, G. 2011. ‘Iamblichean Theurgy: Reflections on the Practice of Later Platonists’. Unpublished paper given at Rice University, Texas, 16/2/11.

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Siorvanes, L. 1996. Proclus, Neoplatonic Philosophy and Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Sharps, M. J., Newborg, E., Van Arsddall, S., DeRuiter, J., Hayward B. and Alcantar, B., 2010. ‘Paranormal Encounters as eyewitness Phenomena: Psychical determinants of Atypical Perceptual Interpretations’, Current Psychology vol. 29, no. 4, 320-327. Silva, F. 2002. Secrets in the Fields: the Science and Mysticism of Crop Circles. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Road Publishing Solomon, G. and J. 1999. The Scole Experiment: Scientific Evidence for Life after Death. London: Piatkus Stanley, M. 2003. Emanuel Swedenborg. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books Stove, D. 1991. The Plato Cult and Other Follies. Oxford: Blackwell Uzdavinys, A. (ed.) 2005. The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Pythagorean and Platonic Philosophy. Bloomington, Indiana: Pentagon Press Walford, D. and Meerbote, R. (eds) 1992. Immanuel Kant – Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Zaleski, C. 1987. Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of near-death experience in medieval and modern times. Oxford: Oxford University Press

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